Standing alone and unchanging,
one can observe every mystery.
Present at every moment and ceaselessly continuing--
This is the gateway to indescribable marvels.
--Lao Tzu

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

future as addiction

My brain is addicted to the future, whether it's in a state of worry or a state of excitement, I am almost always thinking about life as something that will become worse or better than it is now.

Why can't I get addicted to the present? Because the present is nourishment, not addiction. So why am I not finding nourishment in the present?

I pause to do that and so much stress evaporates instantly. Who cares if Mme Fauteux wins this court case? I'll find an apartment somehow. Odds are I'll negotiate an extension at least until 2013. There's really nothing to panic about, other than mystress over winning or losing, which is really just ego.

It's easy to try and make a project out of liberating myself from my ego, but that's really, paradoxiacally just ego. Just more future when everything will be okay without ego. It's all abstraction without the action of actually being in the present, in this present, with this identity that I have now.

Sometimes the present can feel like an addiction. Sometimes I feel the jouissance, a sort of joyful subversive feeling when I'm not doing anything. It's a radical rebellion to the programming of tending to past and future.

An Adventure in Standing Still

This is a record of my long and wide ranging meditation journey, from Zhan Zhuang, a Chinese standing meditation, to Tergar, a non-secular meditation community established by the Tibetan teacher and monk, Mingyur Rinpoche.